Sick Day
by Animegirl1129
Summary: Slash. Nothing good ever comes of kissing Perry when he's sick. Rated for language.


Sick Day

**_Prompt idea from LJ comm kkissbbang. The boys are regrettably, not mine. Perry only lets me play with Harry for so long before he gets all posessive and wants him to himself. Enjoy! Prompt - Sniffles._**

* * *

Perry Van Shrike is pretty hard to live with sometimes. Don't get me wrong, the guys my best friend, I owe him my life (sadly, I believe the ratio of his saves to my saves is somewhere around, oh… 67 to 2) but he has his quirks. One of them is how much more of an ass he is when he's sick.

It started out as a normal day. Or as far as normal goes for us.

"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, I know how cranky you get when your don't get your usual six hours," I called into the darkness that was Perry's room. "But we have a lead on the Frankos case."

We'd gotten in late last night after a stake out that had gone on for fucking eternity. The entire thing had been pointless and we'd learned absolutely nothing - except that stakeouts very well should be classified as a potential cause of death, and now we had another case to deal with on top of all that.

"Come on, Perry. Rise and shine." I stepped into the room, with two cups of his beloved imported coffee in hand. I set the source of his caffeine fix down on the nightstand and moved to shake him awake. He didn't budge, but that was hardly surprising. The man slept like the dead. "Hey, come on. This is ridiculous. I'm supposed to be the lazy one."

"Fuck off." He grumbled, rolling further away from me.

I, however, was not so easily swayed and simply shifted to shake him again. "We have a case." I prodded, once more.

Perry glared up at me, then. "I said 'fuck off,' idiot."

I cringed. "Wow. I mean, I know you're simply intolerable before you get your coffee but this is worse than usual." I tried to offer him the drink, but he refused to accept it. In fact he looked slightly repulsed by the concept of even drinking it. "You… you don't want it? Are you sick or something?"

"Yes, genius."

I paused. "Oh." That explained the worse than usual attitude. "Come to think of it, your voice sounds kind of hoarse. No coffee then?"

"No, fuckhead. I… Ugh. I lack the energy needed to sufficiently insult you. Would you please go get me some aspirin and water? Maybe when you get back I will have thought of something witty to berate you with." Perry requested, throwing an arm over his eyes to block out the light.

I returned to the room a moment later with two aspirin and a bottle of water in hand. "Here ya go." I said, offering them to him. "I'm gonna go check out that lead." I knew one of us had to go. We needed to have some sort of information before our meeting with our client tomorrow night. "And I'll stop by the store and get you some soup, too."

He glared. "Christ. Who are you, my mother?"

"Oh, Perry. Do you really think it wise to insult the person who has control over your food and medication for the time being?" I teased, and turned toward the door once more. "I'll be back in like two hours."

"And if you're not, do not expect me to drag myself out of bed to come save your ass."

Set up for one of those jokes that annoyed him to no end, I quickly retorted. "Who are you kidding? We both know you'd do anything for my ass."

"You wish." I easily dodged the pillow that thumped against the door as I slipped out of the room.

Damn him. He always has to get the last word.

* * *

I returned home approximately one hour and fifty six minutes later. I'd gotten a ton of information on our case thanks to the lead, and I had picked up two containers of chicken noodle soup from the diner down the street. I'd also stopped to restock our supply of cold medicine and cough drops and bought a box of tissues.

"Perry," I called from the kitchen. "You awake?"

"Am now." He groaned, from the direction of the living room. He was sprawled out on the couch with a blanket wrapped around him, and an empty box of Kleenex on the coffee table. One of Perry's favorite movies, Top Gun, was playing on mute on the television, and he looked six kinds of miserable.

"Not feeling any better, huh?" I asked, leaning over him.

He shook his head. "Been coughing and sneezing like crazy."

I offered him the new box of Kleenex. "I'll go get you some more meds and some of that soup."

I left him to protest on the couch while I fetched one of the containers of soup, some water and another dose of medicine. Setting the food down on the coffee table in front of him, I pressed a hand to his head to gage his fever.

"If you don't get your hand off of my head in the next five seconds, I will make sure you lose a few more fingers." He growled, and I wisely removed my hand.

"You're really burning up." I said, sounding way too much like my own mother for my liking. "Better take those pills."

He sent me a withering glare for carrying on as I was, but complied.

"I'm only trying to help." I reminded him, nodding toward the soup.

"I don't need help." Perry answered. "I did survive on my own before you came along. If you do want to help, though, you can go out and find me that fucking teddy bear that's in every commercial on daytime television. That thing is so headache inducing." He glared at the television - even though he had a DVD in. My guess was that he turned today's episode of All My Children off in favor of staring at often shirtless fighter pilots - he also refused to watch it with me, given that I spent half of the movie insisting he was Ice-Man's clone. But, that's another story.

However, with yet another set up for a joke, I could simply not resist. "Oh, so you TiVo General Hospital every day so you can plot the demise of fabric softener mascots? Not because of, oh, the shirtless guys?"

"How much pleasure do you take in torturing someone whose sick, you sadistic moron?" Perry practically growled, which only sent him into a coughing fit. I flopped down on the couch beside him, offering him a cough drop I'd grabbed from the kitchen.

"You're too sick to poke fun at me for a change. I'm merely taking advantage of the opportunity." I assured him, in what was, of course, the most innocent voice I could come up with.

I knew Perry wanted to scream at me, but, I also knew his throat probably hurt too much for it to be worth it. "Just tell me what you found out about the Frankos case." He so tactfully changed the subject and I listed all of the information I'd gathered about our missing persons case.

"So, I'm thinking it might be linked to that divorce case we had last month," I concluded, after I'd finished. "What was it…. The, ugh, Blizzard case?" He seemed impressed with my assessment.

Until he spoke, anyway. "Not a chance in hell. Are you sure you're not the one whose sick? You must be delirious."

I sulked in silence as he ranted about how stupid my fetish with linked cases always proved to me (that kind of thinking got me kidnapped once and mugged another time). Tuning him out, my attention wandered to the television, which, by now, had ended the DVD and returned to the soap operas. Just in time for General Hospital apparently. Ironically enough, one of the characters was being berated by another for doing something undoubtedly not as stupid as it seemed without sound. I knew how he felt.

"Are you even listening to me?" Perry stopped mid-sentence to shout.

"You can yell at me again. You must be feeling better." I noted. His voice kind of sounded better, too.

Perry sighed. "You weren't listening to me, were you?"

I shook my head. "No, but I can summarize." I switched into my mock-Perry voice. A horrible likeness, if I do say so myself. "Harry, you idiot, haven't I told you a million times that not all cases are linked? Did you not learn this lesson before? What will it take to get this through your head? Will you have to get kidnapped? Beaten up? Oh, wait, you already have! Moron." I finished. "There, was I close?"

"Mostly. Except you missed the part where I'm tired of seeing you get hurt because of the stupid shit you do." Apparently his cough had returned full force with the end of his rant, because it started up as soon as he finished.

"Oh, well. That parts optional. You only use it when ranting at me sometimes." I defended.

He was still coughing.

"You should go lie down." I prodded, and earned myself another glare. "Hey, if you're allowed to rant about me getting hurt, I'm allowed to hover and help out on the rare occasion that the tables are turned."

"Fine." He huffed, and I helped him gather the blankets and followed him upstairs.

Once he was settled, I made to leave, but his voice stopped me. And that's where it got weirder than usual. "Hey, Harry?"

"Yeah?" I asked, expecting another insult or rant about my personal safety. He motioned for me to come closer, and when I got in range, he grabbed a hold of my wrist. "What are you--?"

And then he was kissing me.

Oh, how did I react? That would be like any sane human being on the planet. Or, ugh, at least one who had been living with Perry for nearly a year.

I didn't freak out, or push him away, in fact, I kissed him back. Because, maybe I'd been hoping for that for a while now. Maybe. Let's not tell him that.

"Thanks." He said, when he finally pulled away.

"No problem." I nodded and slipped out of the room.

* * *

The next morning, a far too cheery Perry Van Shrike walked into my room. "Rise and shine, Harry." He said, evidently back to his normal self. "I'm feeling better and we have to make up for the surveillance we missed yesterday."

"_We _missed? You mean, the surveillance _you _missed?" I corrected, noting myself that now my voice sounded off. I coughed. "And how are you better already?"

"I dunno. Guess it must have been one of those twenty four hour bugs." He sighed. "Now, come on. We've got to get going."

I shook my head, in the bouts of a second coughing fit. "Uh, I don't feel so well."

"I'll get the Children's Tylenol for you then." He snarked, a smirk on his face as he walked out of the room.

Jackass.

Lesson learned? Kissing Perry when he's sick never ends well.


End file.
